Should Jews feel safe in America?
On March 30, the ADL released its annual report on anti-Semitic incidents in America, which announced a rise of 21 percent over the previous year — 912, up from 751. This follows quickly on the heels of several important pieces (by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic and David Brooks in The New York Times) on the hailstorm of anti-Semitic attacks pelting Europe. American Jews ask ourselves a new question this year: Are we next?
The first time I visited the Great Synagogue of Rome, I was 22, and I remember it mostly for my smugly American reaction: “How sad,” I said to my best friend, a Catholic American, who was traveling with me at the time. “Jews here need armed security guards just to attend a service.”
This was December 2000, almost a year before 9/11, and although I’d spent my life attending various synagogues in Maryland where I’d grown up, in Philadelphia when we visited my grandparents, I was used only to the dowager-humped, hip-high, octogenarian greeters. Liver-spotted ladies with thick glasses and cotton-ball hair who didn’t clear 5 feet but somehow still managed to jumble the bones of your hand in the vice grips of theirs. Nowhere in sight was anyone you could conceivably call “security.”
This was America! “The greatest country in the history of the world to its Jews,” my father would often proclaim. Here, our synagogues were as safe as the churches and mosques.
My, how things change.
This year, my Orthodox synagogue in Beverly Hills took the reasonable step of increasing its number of armed security guards to five. For those communities that can afford it, entering a synagogue has become a little like entering an airport. We submit to metal-detecting wands, routine inspection of bags, while men with holstered guns nod us on.
The immediate provocation for the synagogue’s security upgrade was specific and, as these things often are, a little vague: A non-Jewish Middle-Eastern-looking couple wandered in one day and poked around the rooms. When confronted by a congregant, the woman bolted, the man became belligerent and had to be physically removed.
But this incident was perhaps just the most recent excuse for the security uptick. In August, a gang of anti-Semitic thugs assaulted an Orthodox Jewish couple in New York, punching the man in the head and throwing a water bottle at his wife. Then the gang hopped in its car and waved Palestinian flags before driving off.
“Everyone knows it,” a French Jew who now sends her sons to my children’s school in Los Angeles, warned me back in December. “America is no better than Europe. It’s just 50 years behind.”
I listened to this in stunned disbelief. We may have our problems in America, but we are nothing like Europe, I wanted to say. But something stopped me: Was she right?
Unlike many American Jews of my generation, I’ve seen European Jew-hatred up close. I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford from 2000 to 2002, the height of the Second Intifada. In the spring of 2002, a rally of 500 pro-Palestinian marchers was scheduled to descend on Oxford. I and fewer than a dozen Jewish students from around the university organized a pro-Israel rally to take place alongside it. We requested — and were refused — protection from the Oxford police, who accused us of inciting violence. The Oxford Jewish Congregation politely asked us to refrain from rallying.
Of all the things that shocked my American conscience, it was the explosive hatred of the marchers themselves that left the deepest impression. They waved signs bearing Israeli flags covered in swastikas. They hollered and screamed at our minuscule group, fists raised, while the Oxford police — there ostensibly to protect them from us — stood awkward sentry. I recognized a friend of mine, an Austrian grad student — affable, shy, knowledgeable in the finer points of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy — among the marchers.
Enter: America. In March, Congress passed a bill to grant an additional $13 million to Homeland Security for security at religious institutions. In Los Angeles, where I live, the police department reached out in January to the Jewish Federation and offered its protection to any Jewish institution that needed it in the wake of the Paris attacks on the kosher supermarket. There can be no doubt: America remains a safe place for Jews. My sons wear yarmulkes and tzitzit wherever we go, and we have never been treated with anything but courtesy by other Americans. The number of anti-Semitic incidents, while up sharply, is still low. While there have been numerous incidents of open hostility and discrimination against Jewish students on American campuses, those have not yet reached the level of violence.
But it’s also true that this country is changing. We all feel it. My father never boasts about the “greatest country in the history of the world for the Jews” anymore.
Every week, when my family attends Shabbat services, I am grateful for the armed guards and feel a shiver of disappointment that we need them. My children don’t know any other America. To them, armed guards are just one more necessary synagogue fixture, like an Eternal Light and an ark full of Torahs.
Abigail Shrier (@abigailshrier) is a writer and graduate of Yale Law School living in Los Angeles.
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